Oscar winner Jon Voight (left) has the comeback role of the year as Ray Donovan’s ex-con father, Mickey. (
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Liev Schreiber (
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Tony Award-winning actor Liev Schreiber has always thought of New York theater as his comfort zone. But now that he’s spent a grueling few months starring in a TV series for Showtime, he has new respect for such gigs. “It’s really intense,” he says, “particularly when you’re number one on the call sheet.”

That means on “Ray Donovan,” Schreiber is Ray Donovan, a bruiser making a living with an LA law firm as the guy who makes TMZ-style problems go away for its clientele — stars, athletes and bigwigs. The pressures don’t end there, however: a stoic husband and father of two trying to keep his home life stable, Donovan routinely finds himself pulled into the vortex of his troubled South Boston family, including the dad he hates, Mickey (Jon Voight), an Irish mobster fresh off a 20-year prison sentence whose agenda for insinuating himself into Ray’s life isn’t strictly paternal.

“Very tempestuous, very volatile,” is how Schreiber describes Ray’s relationship with Mickey. “Whenever the two of them are around, it’s like putting a match to gasoline.”

Schreiber isn’t new to episodic television, having done a four-episode “CSI” stint in 2007. But the actor’s regular “no” to his agents when they’d send him offers to do a series — “I guess they felt like I was aging, and it was the appropriate thing to do,” he quips — ended when the 45-year-old actor read the “Ray Donovan” pilot script, and responded to Ray as a dark yet oddly principled figure.

“It was particularly well-written in terms of issues around male sexuality and contemporary ideas of morality, parenting and violence,” says Schreiber, whose own resume of complex men includes playing Hamlet at the Public Theatre, David Mamet’s Ricky Roma in a Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross” and a young Orson Welles in the television film “RKO 281.” “I thought [creator] Ann [Biderman] had figured out a nice way to articulate that through this character.”

Biderman, who created the cop series “Southland” and won an Emmy writing for “NYPD Blue,” says Schreiber “just has this ineffable quality of being supremely male. We joke that the first time we met, he said, ‘What qualities do you see in me?’ and I shouted, ‘I need a man!’ There were people behind us who looked over nervously, but it’s true. He’s a big, Stanley Kowalski-gorgeous, stunningly great actor who is very virile in this fantastic, old-fashioned way.”

Ray’s quiet, unspoken strength took some getting used to. “As a theater actor, text is everything, and suddenly here I am and I’ve got eight words an episode,” says Schreiber, who studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and has a master’s from Yale. “But that’s been the challenge of the character, and one of the things I found most interesting. In trying to learn something about film acting, that was a place I needed to go.”

He’s bullish about the show’s cast, too, which apart from Voight, includes Elliott Gould as Ray’s perpetually agitated boss, Ezra Goldman; Paula Malcolmson as his wife, Abby; Eddie Marsan and Dash Mihok as Ray’s brothers — Eddie, a boxer with Parksinson’s, and Bunchy, an alcoholic who was abused by a priest in childhood.

“This is a stable of thoroughbreds who have only begun to stretch their legs,” notes Schreiber. “I remember when I was doing ‘The Daytrippers’” — the 1996 indie comedy that helped kickstart his film career — “I looked around, and it was Stanley Tucci, Anne Meara, Hope Davis, Parker Posey, and Campbell Scott, and I thought with that cast, it was a no-brainer. I had the same feeling about this crew, that ‘Wow, this is iron tight.’”

As cable dramas go, “Ray Donovan” shares many elements with “The Sopranos” —the mobster patriarch; the social-climbing wife; the two kids; the suburban McMansion — but it remains to be seen if this is television’s next great drama. For Schreiber, it’s made clear to him why people are saying we’re in the midst of a new Golden Age for the medium. “All the really good writers, in order to have a platform for their material, cable television is presenting the best opportunities,” he says. “And as artists mature, to [do work] in an environment where you can make a living and maintain a certain caliber of quality, television has sort of replaced independent film in that regard.”

That didn’t make shooting 12 episodes away from his beloved New York any easier, though, between missing his favorite eateries, his friends, and “walking out the door and being surrounded by New Yorkers who don’t give a crap.” Learning to surf helped occupy his time, as did visits from his partner, actress Naomi Watts, and their sons Sasha and Kai.

“Fortunately, my children are extremely amusing,” he says. “For me, it’s 99.9% the reason to have children, so they can amuse you. They’re hilarious.”

Being a dad was a large part of why he sparked to “Ray Donovan” in the first place. “The emotionality around my own father” — Schreiber’s parents divorced when he was young — “and being a father to my children is rich stuff for me at this point in my life,” he says. “It’s something I think about a lot.”

The key male figure in Schreiber’s life was his grandfather, who delivered meat to restaurants, played the cello, and collected art. “A very civilized, intelligent, and very masculine guy,” says the actor. Asked what life lessons his grandfather’s life exposed him to, Schreiber says, “The lesson for me was, never judge somebody by their job. And that hard work says a lot about who a person is.”